


Fish Night

by moonix



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Based on the Fish Night episode but no context needed to read it, Deserts, Fish Night, Ghosts, Love Death And Robots - Freeform, M/M, Oceans, Roadtrips, The Aesthetique TM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:00:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23925772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: Neil and Andrew get stranded in the desert. Surprisingly, no one gets eaten by sharks.
Relationships: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 22
Kudos: 227





	Fish Night

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the amazing [Fish Night art](https://llstarcasterll.tumblr.com/post/612805095233601536) by llstarcasterll, go check it out! It's based on the Fish Night episode of Love Death And Robots, though you don't need to have watched that or any other episodes to follow the fic.

“It’s dead,” Andrew says, slamming the hood shut and wiping his hands on a rag. “Radiator’s done for.”

“Crap,” Neil mutters. The sun is teetering into its downward descent, a drop of whisky rolling down a tipsy blue sky inch for slow inch, but the heat is still thick and caked to his skin. “Can’t you fix it?”

“There’s no coming back from the dead,” Andrew says, almost amused. “Not even for a Plymouth.”

He pushes off the car and sits down in the meagre strip of shade it casts on the dry, rocky ground. Neil watches him unlace his Chucks and drains the last sip of water from his bottle, then pulls his arm back and hurls it across the desert. The faraway plink as it lands, not even shattering, isn’t nearly as satisfying as he thought it would be.

“And what did that achieve?” Andrew asks him.

“Nothing,” Neil grumbles. “So what do we do? No one’s gonna come down this way.”

“And doesn’t that tickle your little rabbit heart?” Andrew says, his voice still hot and dry with dead amusement.

“Not unless we miraculously find some water,” Neil snaps back. He walks a scraggly circle around the car, kicks some rocks and scares off a salamander. When he gets back to Andrew, he slides down to the ground and perches on the balls of his feet, inhaling the fumes from the car and the scent of sweat and sunscreen that clings to him.

“We rest,” Andrew tells him. “Until dawn when it’s cooler, and then we walk.”

“All the way back to the last truck stop?”

“Yup.”

“Great,” Neil sighs, slumping down at last. “Just fucking great.”

The sun sets and the sky swallows and purples around it, leaving behind a sticky orange residue on the bottom of the horizon. Stars coat the night like grains of spilled sugar and the desert comes alive with the faint, rustling sounds of life all around them, wind whispering across the ground. If Neil squints, he can see flickering, glimmering lights twisting in the distance like Northern lights, a luminous hemline dragging along the dirt.

“Reminds me of the sea,” he says, throat cracked and dry. Andrew is dozing with his head on Neil’s shoulder, a thin film of sweat between them, but he opens one eye to check what Neil is referring to.

“Never been to the ocean,” he croaks, and closes it again.

“Technically, this was once an ocean, millions of years ago,” Neil points out. “All of this was water, full of extinct creatures. The world’s an old place. And for a long time, it was nothing but sea.”

Andrew is quiet for a long moment, his breath a steady trickle against Neil’s collarbone. Then he says: “If the ghosts of people can haunt a house, can the ghosts of creatures not haunt where they once lived?”

“Is that a quote?” Neil asks.

“No idea,” Andrew says, pushing himself upright and yawning. “I’m gonna sleep.”

“Okay,” Neil says, getting up as well. He stretches until his spine pops, watching Andrew crawl into the back seat. The open door is as good as an invitation, and if Neil had any doubts, the look in Andrew’s eyes as he lies on his back practically grabs him by the collar and reels him in.

Carefully, Neil climbs over him and tucks himself into the spaces left by Andrew’s limbs. Andrew hooks his fingers into the loose fabric of Neil’s tank top and tugs, guiding Neil where he wants him, and Neil cups one hand over Andrew’s heart and falls asleep to the steady drizzle of his heartbeat.

It feels like barely a minute has passed when he startles awake again, but the blackness around them has taken on a different, deep-sea quality. Static crackles through the radio speakers and something moves beyond the steamed-up windows of the car. Neil squeezes his eyes shut and opens them again. There’s another empty bottle in the footrest, a single drop of water on the soft lip of its mouth. As Neil watches, the drop pops free and starts to float upwards, like the ghost of a bubble.

“Wake up,” he whispers, but Andrew is already awake, his hand tightening around Neil’s. At some point in the night he must have covered Neil’s hand on his chest with his own.

Neil reaches out with his free hand and wipes at the condensation on the window, peering out. The air is awash with what looks like a cloud of glittery plankton, swirling around the car like pollen. A flash of light catches Neil’s eye and he turns just in time to spot the luminous, skeletal shapes of jellyfish pumping away like ghostly, disembodied hearts.

“Neil,” Andrew says, and something about his tone makes Neil snap out of his open-mouthed reverie. Andrew’s hand has grown stiff and there’s a deep furrow between his brows as he looks up at the swathe of night-sea-dream world visible where Neil wiped at the glass.

“I see it, too,” Neil whispers, understanding. “You’re not hallucinating. It must be something like you said, ghosts of an older world.”

Small, glowing shapes are crowding against the window now, a curious school of fish peeking in. Neil only sees them out of the corner of his eyes, keeping his gaze fixed on Andrew like an anchor.

Abruptly, Andrew sits up. He steadies Neil before he can topple off and twists toward the window.

“Boo,” he says, quietly and without inflection, and the fish promptly scuttle off.

“Do you want to go outside?” Neil says. Lights swim across Andrew’s impassive face, twisting like eels, and he nods.

They open the door together and step outside onto the bottom of a spectral ocean. Bright pink shrimp crowd around their feet, dispersing as they walk. A giant, jewel-green turtle paddles leisurely past, trailing small fish that nibble at its shell. The sparse plants growing along the ground have turned limp and soft, twisting in invisible currents, and the sand ripples and shifts with ghostly reflections.

Andrew lifts a hand and a large, reddish octopus wraps a tentacle around his arm. He shakes it off and the thing slouches coils its long body underneath the car until it’s completely hidden.

“Amazing,” Neil whispers.

They can still breathe, but there’s a briny, salted twist to the air that makes Neil’s nose tingle like he’s accidentally inhaled a mouthful of seawater. His clothes stick to him with old sweat and he starts to pluck at them, wanting to feel the cool rush of the night on his skin.

“What are you doing?” Andrew asks, tight like he’s talking through neoprene.

“I wanna swim,” Neil says, pulling off his top and tossing it to the floor, except instead of landing on the rock he’d aimed at it starts to float away into the darkness. “I’m going up there, I think.”

“What,” Andrew says, “why.”

“Call it a primal urge,” Neil calls out over his shoulder with a giddy grin, already shaking off his shorts and underwear.

“You’re gonna get eaten by a megalodon!” Andrew shouts after him, a thin stream of anger bubbling out with the words.

“As if they would bother with small fry like us,” Neil says, stepping up on a rock and kicking off. One moment he’s jumping and then he’s floating, suspended in not-quite-air-but-not-quite-water, his momentum carrying him into another swarm of fish that flit and flicker around him, leaving ghostly trails behind like an afterimpression of light on Neil’s retinas. He narrowly avoids bashing his head against an outcrop and scrapes his toes along the ground for a moment before he figures out how to move his arms and legs, kicking off another rock and somersaulting straight into a giant, dimly blue whale.

It’s more solid than he expected. He can feel the rough scrape of its skin under his hands and laughs. If this is a dream, it’s the most pleasant he’s had in—a lifetime, really.

“Neil!” Andrew calls. “Come back! For fuck’s—Neil!”

“No!” Neil shouts back. “You come up here!”

He folds his arms behind his head and floats on his back, looking at the distant glimmer of the stars. Or are they more plankton? He drifts comfortably among the remains of a much, much older world, on the mottled backs of ancient, long-dead creatures remembering where they once swam. The desert-ocean is vast and infinite around him, and he thinks he might actually be feeling—

—safe.

“Neil! Look out!”

Andrew’s voice is warbled, like he’s trying to speak underwater. Neil reaches out a lazy hand and boops a jellyfish that yields, mushroomy and soft, folding itself inside-out. There’s even an echo of a sting travelling down Neil’s fingertips and he laughs again—it tickles more than anything.

Something large looms up out of the dark on his left; panes of hard, cracked skin and a jagged mouth. Neil gets caught in its slipstream, whirling like a spinning top for a moment, then something snatches his arm and pulls him down hard.

He lands on solid earth with a painful thump, tangled with another body.

“Megalodon,” Andrew pants, his grip hot and unrelenting on Neil’s arm. “I fucking—told you.”

Neil rolls over onto his back and looks up, watching the creatures fade in the first greenish hues of morning light that trickles over the horizon. The shark has moved on, closing in on a dolphin-like shape with a long narrow jaw.

“Were you worried?” he teases.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Andrew grits out. “Oh, wait. Too late.”

“You were worried,” Neil grins, turning his head to look at Andrew, who is infinitely more fascinating than the mirage above them, “that I would get eaten by the big scary ghost shark.”

“You’re naked,” Andrew says, ignoring him. “I am not letting you borrow my clothes.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to stay naked.”

“Shut up.”

Neil shuts up, gazing at Andrew’s face and the way the first gauzy tendrils of dawn graze his skin.

“Stop staring,” Andrew growls, tossing a handful of damp sand at him. Neil smirks and grabs a handful to toss back, but comes up with something jagged and sharp.

It’s a seashell, withered and bone-white. Neil tucks it into Andrew’s pocket and laces his empty hand with his.

“Hey,” Neil says, “we should get going. If you give me your phone I’ll call Wymack to pick us up from the truck stop, he’ll be up by now. I think they even sold breakfast, though no promises on whether or not it’s edible.”

Andrew looks at him, and for a moment his eyes reflect the fathomless depths of a long-dead ocean. They get up at the same time, brush the sand off themselves and walk back to the car in the company of a lone anglerfish, glowing so dimly as to almost be swallowed up by the slowly oozing dawn.

Andrew rummages around the trunk for a moment before shoving an old hoodie and a pair of sweatpants at Neil. They smell vaguely like cigarette smoke as Neil pulls them on.

“Should’ve known,” Andrew mutters as he puts his shoes back on. “If anyone could manage to get eaten by an extinct killer machine, it would be you.”

“Oh, come on. It was barely even real.”

“Next time we go on a road trip, I’m bringing a fucking machete.”

“Hot,” Neil hums, smirking when Andrew shoots him a glare.

“It is going to be, if we don’t get a move on.”

“I’m not the one who hates running.”

“I hate you.”

“Sucks,” Neil says, “because you’re stuck with me for the next couple of hours at least. Should’ve let the sharks eat me. Hey, how about a beach holiday? We could—”

“No.”

“But—”

“No more fish. And no more fucking sharks.”


End file.
